The Universal Remote Sucks. Here’s How to Fix It

That awesome 1,000-watt, THX-certified, 7.1 surround sound 3-D home theater you spent your kid’s college fund on is hampered by a single piece of technology: the remote in your hand.

Universal remote controls suck. Instead of evolving like everything else, the remote has become the most inefficient piece of technology in your home.

Think about it. The TV has gone HD. The VCR has given way to optical media. Cable is yielding to streaming video. Yet the remote control has devolved. Blame our obsession with touchscreens and the industry’s mad push to give you access to smart TV features you don’t use. Enter the universal remote control with slick touchscreen displays instead of buttons.

Touchscreens are great for smartphones. They absolutely suck for remotes.

A good universal remote control should be simple enough for anyone to use, yet powerful enough to control the most sophisticated gear. Too often, though, they’re a jumbled mess of confusing buttons, menus and options, most of which you don’t need and never use.

The remote control was created to work with one device — your TV or, if you were on the cutting edge of home entertainment in the late ’70s and early ’80s, a top-loading VCR. As we embraced app-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players with Netflix access and videogame consoles that double as cable boxes, the universal remote attempted to keep up.

This created the “more buttons” problem. A universal remote must handle every aspect of every device. So we have remotes that look like airliner flight decks. The Samsung remote that shipped with my TV has 47 buttons, including one for “social.” The king of universal remotes, the Logitech Harmony 900, has 42 buttons and customizable touchscreen buttons. Most of them are actually required, but we could lose the “menu” and “help” buttons, to name a few, and everyone would still be happy.

Setting these things up is anything but easy or intuitive. To customize touchscreen buttons, you connect the remote to your computer, create viewing profiles for devices and save them to the remote. And then you have to actually find those buttons.

Touchscreens are great for devices you look at while using them — tablets, smartphones and hand-held gaming consoles. Remotes? Not so much. The “wow” factor wears off after about a month, and then it becomes apparent that this is actually a horrible idea. Looking down at your remote to find the button, then shifting the remote in your hand to point it at the TV leads to the wrong custom button being pressed. And just try using one in the dim light of a darkened living room while watching a movie.

That’s why remotes need real buttons that you can feel in the dark when changing the channel, adjusting the volume or switching from one device to another. Tactile feedback is essential to good remote design.

Of course companies like Apple and Microsoft have attempted to fix this. The Apple TV remote reduces the clutter. It’s an elegant design that requires you to use another remote to adjust the volume, which isn’t that elegant. Microsoft believes voice-activated TV is the future. But after yelling “Xbox Play!” for the sixth time and having your wife yell, “What’s wrong?” from the next room, it’s clear that doesn’t really work so well.

The remote control shouldn’t involve yelling or searching for six-digit access codes like a video game from the 90s. Nor should it require figuring out the optimal finger placement on a touchscreen or navigating 50 buttons, half of which you’ll never use.

Instead of trying to over-tech the universal remote with fancy touchscreens and a button for every feature, the perfect universal remote would access only the most frequently used features using customizable buttons you can actually feel. When it comes to remotes, less would be so much more.

Here’s an easy way to determine what should, and shouldn’t, be on a universal remote: If a toddler can, within minutes of picking it up, change the language to French, completely screw up the color balance and program the TV to shut off every 30 minutes, the remote has too many damn buttons.

Let’s see customizable backlit e-ink buttons that access specific features. The “Netflix” button found on certain Blu-ray players is a good example of button that actually makes sense on a remote. Ditch the buttons for menus and settings. You never use them and they cause more heartache than help.

While we’re at it, remove IR as the default communication protocol and replace it with any low-latency wireless technology that doesn’t require line of sight to operate. That would, of course, require manufacturers to embrace a wireless standard, which means it’ll be 20 years or so before we can change the channel without having to move that glass on the coffee table.

We also need an easier way to syncing our gadgets with a universal remote. Why are we still looking up codes and plugging them in manually? Crib from video game consoles and use a pairing button that has everything playing together nicely at the press of a button. That will require more cooperation among manufacturers, so maybe that’s a pipe dream. But it shouldn’t be.

There are some remotes that fulfill some of these points. The Logitech Harmony 900 is a good example of a remote that actually works as it should. Yes, the touchscreen implementation is overkill, but the latest model has an RF feature so you don’t have to point it directly at the device. It’s the best on the market, but it costs $350. Ouch. Remove some of the settings and menu buttons, replace the touchscreen with actual buttons and cut the price to about $100 and you’d have the perfect remote. It can’t be that hard.